Format: audio onlyRunning time: approx. 31 min 15 sec.Summary:
What can psychoanalysis teach us about how we Americans understand our
place in the world? Dr. Stephen Soldz talks with Pinky about narcissism,
projection, and an enormous lost opportunity of our post-Cold War era.

Transcript

Note: The following is a verbatim transcript of the program's spoken dialogue.

[ phone ringing ]

Soldz: Hi.

Pinky: Hi, is this Dr. Stephen Soldz?

Soldz: Yes it is.

Pinky: Hi, this is Pinky... from the desert.

Soldz: Hi, how you doing?

Pinky: Um, fine thank you. Dr. Soldz, may I ask you some questions about psychoanalysis and fear and... empire building and stuff?

Soldz: Sure.

Pinky: Okay... Um, maybe first can you please tell me
about psychoanalysis - like, what's it for? And what is the objective of
therapy?

Soldz: Well, psychoanalysis is based on the assumption
that in addition to the things we're aware of that there's a lot of
mental life that we're unaware of, you know, the concept of
'unconscious'. In particular, wishes and motives that we're unaware of
because they conflict with other aspects of life - with reality, with
the way we think we should be, and that these unconscious wishes and
motives frequently get in the way of us having a enjoyable, meaningful
life. So, the essence of analysis is to get people to talk and to try
and find out why people are avoiding certain areas. Technically we call
it resistance, but what it is that people are avoiding and why they are
avoiding it, and to try and reduce this resistance to knowing yourself.
So that people then develop greater flexibility and can live their life
with less compulsion and a wider range of thoughts and feelings guiding
them. So that is sort of the essence of what the process is about.

Pinky: When people construct these kinds of - can I
call them self-narratives? - if these narratives differ from outward
'reality' too much, is this merely annoying or can this be dangerous?

Soldz: That's a good question. I mean, all of our self
narratives, as you put it, differ from reality in various ways. None of
us lives totally 'in reality'. So, but, if too much of it differs
from... and especially the internal reality, for example, someone who
thinks of themselves as only being a nice person who never gets angry,
that can be very limiting. There are many things in the world that do
get one angry and if one has to keep that out of awareness that one
never gets angry, then it can express itself in various other ways that
can cause problems. So no, it's not always a problem, but it often is.

Pinky: In one of your talks, I heard you characterize
America as suffering from a sort of 'social narcissism'. Can you please
explain what you mean by this?

Soldz: Well, I'm sort of using a metaphor from clinical
narcissism, which involves a self-absorption, a general unawareness of
other people. It's not that you don't know that there's physically
another person and they, you know, they've got a different body and a
different name, but you're not really aware that they're different than
you, that they have different thoughts, different wishes. You think that
they're just like you. You know, like a patient who says "I know what
you're thinking!", and it's what they're thinking. It doesn't occur to
them that you might be thinking something different than what they're
thinking or you might have different feelings than them. So, in a
clinical sense narcissism involves this sense that others are just like
oneself, and therefore an unawareness of others as real, separate
people.

In some sense I think the United States suffers from this at a social
level. We have this ideal that we're the best people on Earth. President
Reagan described it as the, I think it was "the shining city on a hill"
from the New Testament, you know, we're this beacon to the world and
all and the rest of the world should just realize that and emulate us.
They should aspire to have our cars, our political system, our
Coca-Cola, and there's very little interest in or concern that different
cultures have different values, different interests. You know: "Why are
they so weird?". And I think that, you know, it's true of all countries
to some degree, but I think the United States has been particularly
true partly because we've been relatively isolated by the oceans and by
being such a big country, you know we've had a huge influx of immigrants
over the centuries. And we've been relatively spared from internal
wars, at least since the Civil War, and... many Americans do not travel
overseas, knowledge of foreign languages is like much lower than most
other countries, at least most other industrial countries, and there's
just a lack of curiosity about other people. I mean, the most extreme of
this is our president, you know, I believe who just about never
traveled outside of the country, he can barely stand to sleep in a bed
different than his own, he needs a very controlled environment, and he
just doesn't seem to be curious about anyone in the rest of the world.
It never occurs to him that maybe Iraqis have different interests. Maybe
they don't want what exactly what he thinks we want. But I think it's
true of a lot of Americans in general.

Pinky: Okay, so I assume that these kinds of problems
are only compounded when the individual or the nation is very powerful,
is that correct?

Soldz: You probably can only keep it up either in
isolation or when you're extremely powerful. You know, those at the
bottom of the rung probably don't have the luxury of really believing
that because they're constantly impinged upon by others. So, in that
sense, I think you're probably right.

Pinky: In one of your talks I was listening to, you
cited a very interesting statistic re: trust in America. You said that
from 1960 to 2000, the amount of people who would agree with the
statement "Most people can be trusted" dropped from approximately 55% to
35%, and something like 25% among high school students. What's
happening?

Soldz: Well we seem to have a much more fearful
society. Since 2001, we've seen the results of this, and the deliberate
exploitation of it by certain politicians. But I think it's been true
for a long time. There was this myth of this shining city on a hill that
lasted through much of the Cold War to a great degree, and it got
challenged. In the 60s, it got challenged by the Civil Rights Movement,
by the social movements spawned in opposition to the Vietnam War. I know
I'm of that generation. In the sense that our country was doing
something pretty wrong in Vietnam. It was a pretty rude awakening for a
lot of people. And, we've also had increased social tensions around the
cities, and then, especially since around 1980, a large increase both in
inequality, you know, it's now become accepted, but it's been true for a
long time, there's been a large and growing gap between the upper few
percent of the population and the majority of the population in income,
in social power, which I think is probably almost as important as
income. The institutions of popular power in the country have decreased,
say, unions, neighborhood organizations, things that allowed ordinary
people to exert influence over their lives have decreased radically. So
there's much more of a sense of powerlessness, of being driven by
external forces.

To a large percentage of the population, there's a decline of security.
We know that, for example, retirement, that there used to be a good
number of jobs which had pension plans that were guaranteed pension
plans, and you put in your 20 or 30 or whatever years and you were taken
care of pretty well. And that's gone. Now we have a fractured.. you
take care of yourself with a 401k that's never anywhere near equal to an
old pension plan. You know, the social welfare net has been frayed in
various ways, and people sense it. They don't have a good understanding
of it but, there's in many ways people just feel afraid. Unfortunately, I
think people often end up attributing it to sort of the wrong things.
For a long while the danger was from poor people, and essentially black
people, that was exploited. You know, the fear of crime. And I don't
want to say that crime isn't a real problem, but we've noticed that as
violent crime has declined for the last almost 15 years now, fear of
crime has increased. The amount of crime and the danger doesn't reflect
your fear of it. I mean, it partially has to do with the media, but it
also partially has to do with there's a reflection of an overall sense
of just 'Danger', of that things are not safe. And we focus on
particular things like crime or most recently like terrorists in order
to give some structure to this sense that something's not quite right,
that things are getting worse. You know, we've seen in recent polls that
there's a radical increase in the sense that the nation is going in the
wrong direction, and that leads to this general sense, well, it's
easier to find a scapegoat in some sense than to live with that
uncertainty and fear.

Pinky: So... into this era of instability and
insecurity, from a psychoanalytic perspective, how does one control the
population by manufacturing fear in the form of an external enemy?

Soldz: Well, it seems the structure the way people
think and in certain circumstances it pulls people together. You know,
you think of WWII and the sense of the nation 'being together'. In
recent years, is this odd quality. We have this external enemy which is
of a very unfocused character, you know, terrorism, which is - "What in
the world is terrorism? Where is it located? Who does it manifest?" The
administration if they wanted to mobilize, and I'm sort of the opinion
that they had at some level consciously or not that unconsciously were
aware of creating a new enemy to replace the Cold War enemy. I remember
watching Bush's speech after 9/11, his speech to Congress, and I was
struck how he defined terrorism in very vague terms, so that the 'war on
terrorism' could never be won. I mean, how can you win a war on a
tactic? Terrorism has been around for thousands of years. There's no way
you can win this war, so therefore, you know, he didn't define it in
terms of Al-Qaeda or any particular enemy. And, I think it was
deliberate, but we have this war combined with this sort of lack of a
war footing in the country because I think that they guessed that they
couldn't sustain it, that opposition to their policies would have
increased a lot if they actually asked for sacrifice. So if I recall
correctly, the same speech told people to go to the mall and go shopping
in order to prevent some economic collapse.

So you have this formless enemy. I mean, terrorism can be anywhere, can
be anyone, and this sense that there's nothing concrete you're doing
about it. This is in some sense the worst situation. If you remember you
know you have these fears, go out and buy duct tape, and other nonsense
like that that just leads to this increase in fear, but in a formless
fear. It's not a fear of the Nazis which is much more concrete. So, it
becomes our manifestation of all our worst fears, and it also becomes I
think to some sense a manifestation of our guilt, that Americans in some
sense know that we have this privileged status in the world, we use a
far greater fraction of the resources of the world than our population,
which suggests we should, and that it's built upon a world where other
people have to be kept down if we're going to keep having these
resources. So there is a real danger, and it gets focused but in it's
undifferentiated way so that it doesn't work as well psychologically, as
more traditional enemies, and I think it leads to greater anxiety.

Pinky: Hmm, this is really interesting. It kind of
sounds like, sort of, a cycle, like we're projecting... Is that what
you're talking about? Projection?

Soldz: Yes, yeah, I'm talking about projection, trying
not to use the technical word! [laugh] But yes, projection. And
remember, projection is projecting what's in us. Which doesn't mean, you
know, there's the old saying "just because you're paranoid, doesn't
mean that someone's not out to get you" but, it's our own fears and our
own hatred, you know, "it's not me who hate those other people for
trying to get what I've taken from them or what I'm getting unfairly,
but it's them who hate me" is the process of projection. And in fact, it
goes to a further step, to what psychoanalysts now call 'projective
identification'. Projective identification is where you project your
feelings, wishes into another person and you then act in such a way as
to get that person to enact it. So you act in such a way as to get the
other person to give you grounds to be paranoid of them. You make them
so uncomfortable, you know, "Why are you staring at me?" You say that
and someone's likely to get hostile. Again these are somewhat metaphors.
But in projective identification it's analogous to 'blowback' that
Chalmers Johnson and others have talked about. We do things in such a
way as to arouse others to take us on and to be a greater danger. I'm
not trying to claim, I don't want to be misunderstood as saying that
there aren't dangers, let's say Al-Qaeda, or certain Islamic extremists
aren't potentially dangerous, but that we act in such a way as to
magnify those dangers and increase them rather than to reduce them. Take
the war in Iraq, which is you know, in every poll around the world has
led to precipitous decline in respect for the United States. That can't
be making us safer.

Pinky: Okay, in terms of your work, how would you go
about trying to help someone who's suffering from these kinds of mental
projections, or narcissism? How do you help them to overcome this?

Soldz: Well, that's a good question, and unfortunately
it doesn't easily generalize to the social sphere. You know the first
thing is you have to create a safe environment, and that's what we try
and do in the office. One where a person can have any thought or feeling
and not be afraid that's going to cause problems for them. So it's of
course a gradual process. Then, you have to be not too challenging, you
don't go telling people, "Hey, you're projecting! Why are you projecting
on to me?" That doesn't usually work, that usually arouses greater
defensiveness. So you accept whatever it is the person has to say,
whatever it is they feel and at the same time you try not to be too
alien to them, not to be so "good and understanding" that we increase
the feelings a person has for themselves. And so then there's a gradual
process of trying to get a person to put into words rather than act to
experience. Because a lot of what people do is they act in order not to
experience - in order not to feel angry, or not to feel ashamed, or not
to feel terrified - they act. You know, it feels safer and more in
control if I yell at you instead of having some feeling that I'm in
danger or I don't understand what's going on. Or, I'm terrified of
myself. It takes a long time for people to get to a point where they
will admit that it's primarily themselves that they're most scared of -
what they don't know, or what they think they shouldn't know about
themselves that's most terrifying. I mean if you can accept that then
you can deal better about the external world.

Pinky: Hmm. I know you started out by saying that it's
difficult to generalize these kinds of things to the social sphere, but
are there maybe like, at least general patterns that psychiatrists can
see that might help us to approach these kinds of problems at a societal
or international scale?

Soldz: Yeah, I mean we know some things and they're not
profound. I wish I had the profound answers but I don't think anybody
does. I think, you know, we psychoanalysts are just one small part of
trying to piece together these issues. I don't want to foster the
megalomania that any field has the answers to human problems. But we
certainly know that belligerence is the opposite of understanding and
it's not gonna lead to increased harmony. That you have to come to try
and understand others and understand that they're different. Part of the
problem that the Bush administration got into Iraq was that they had
this image of Iraqis as children. I mean they wouldn't quite express it
that way, but you know, there are phrases like "we have to help them
grow up", "we have to educate them", "we have to teach them democracy"
or whatever it is. And the problem is, Iraqis aren't children. They're
grown ups. And they have their own wishes, their own fears, their own
desires, and their own culture. And that psychological orientation,
which is often been the one of colonialism, that the Natives are
children who, you know, we need to be this paternalistic parent. It
doesn't work very well, and in the modern world seems to work not at
all.

So... I mean I don't know if we can generalize exactly from the
consulting room, but we know that you have to develop a greater
awareness of others, the ability to talk and to listen, and the
acceptance, and this is for Americans a major major problem, the
acceptance that our country, like all other countries, it's good and
it's bad, and our motives are no less pure than any other countries'
motives. This is something that Noam Chomsky has focused on a lot. You
know, the myth of American exceptionalism, that the United States is
somehow the only country in human history which only has pure motives.
So for example, the history of the Vietnam War has been re-written in
the school books and even in the newspapers and the press as one of
American idealism that was sort of too idealistic and pure to deal with a
dirty world. So we went in to bring democracy and all these good things
to Vietnam and we couldn't really acknowledge that, you know, Vietnam
was corrupt and had these dictators and things, but it was all the
goodness of our motives, which is a total violation of history. The
United State's motives were anything but pure and democracy was the last
thing on the US agenda there as witnessed at the elections that were
called for and a number of treaties were always cancelled under US
pressure because the North Vietnamese would win them. And a similar
thing in Iraq. There's this myth that the United States went into Iraq
to bring democracy and yes, there's the language of democracy, but we
know that in fact one of the first actions of Paul Bremer was to cancel
local elections. And why did they cancel local elections? Because they
didn't think that the pro-US factions who had been in exile, and didn't
have local roots, they thought that they would lose. So democracy simply
meant electing a pro-US government. So in that sense, one step is to
become self-aware. To accept that the United States, no worse than any
other country, but also not much different than other countries, has its
own interests, and pursues them, and sometimes for good, and sometimes
for ill, but unless we can recognize our own motives, how in the world
are we gonna deal with other people with their complex motives?

So that's one lesson we have there, and certainly an increased
belligerence toward the world that we've seen in the last number of
years is little question that leads to increased belligerence on the
other side. You know there was the belief that the United States was so
powerful with its shock and awe, that we could overwhelm any country,
and we see how well that worked - this tiny little country of Iraq with
about a twelfth our population and no military to speak of has defeated
the United States military. So, at some point you have to come to terms
and listen to others, which unfortunately we're not ready to do in Iraq.
I mean, we still have Congress debate "What's the proper government for
Iraq?" It doesn't occur to Congress that it's not for the United
State's Congress or anyone in the United States to choose that. [laugh]
You know, whether or not federalism is a good policy, I don't know, but
that's for Iraqis to decide. It's not for the US Congress to adopt. And
until the U.S. learns that lesson, it's not going to have much success.
So I don't know if I've answered your question there or not because I
think, you know, it takes psychoanalysis, it takes years for an
individual. And I wish I knew what the analog at the social level is,
but it's hard to do that, other than to know that some of what we need
to accomplish is the same.

Pinky: Yeah, thank you. I mean, I think that gives us
something to think about because that's not the direction that public
discourse is going over the last few years, to say the least.

Soldz: Yeah, and unfortunately it's on all sides. I
mean, all a politician has to say is "Why don't we try talking to Iran?"
and they're in deep trouble.

Pinky: Right. I was wondering if I could ask you this
semi-personal question. Psychoanalysts are not popularly known as being
very politically engaged. I mean, we don't generally see a ton of you
guys on television protesting this or that. What has been the connection
for you that's led you to be more public in your opposition to the
so-called 'War on Terror', and to empire building in general?

Soldz: Well let me say two things. One, I think your
assumption is partly wrong. Psychoanalysis was born as a radical set of
ideas. It was a great challenge to the status quo and in fact almost all
of the early psychoanalysts were political radicals of one stripe or
another. In pre-war Europe, it was often allied with various social
movements. But when it came to the United States, what happened was that
psychoanalysts came from Europe as the Nazis took over and in this
country, they sort of gave up their radical beliefs partly out of fear I
think, and partly out of the general processes that it were occurring
in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and it became a much more sedate and
established profession in this country. But that's not been its history
everywhere and for example, in Latin America, there are long traditions
of psychoanalysts working very closely with social movements in
Argentina, in Nicaragua, in Brazil, and so in some sense the United
States' form of psychoanalysis in its particular sort of social quietism
is the exception, perhaps more than the rule. But even in this country,
there's been an increasing number of psychoanalysts who are becoming
more activist. There are a lot of people. It's not the dominant
mainstream, but it's not a total excluded fringe either. So I think to
some degree psychoanalysis gets a bad rap from some of the sort of
Hollywood-ish stereotypes.

For me personally, I mean, in fact, my history is sort of the other way.
I was a political radical first from very early in my teens and the
social movements of the 60s. Now that said, that was a long time ago and
I have been less active over the decades. I have a family and you know,
like many of us, we're raising kids, and doing this and that, but when
the Iraq war came, my activism came out. I could not believe that at the
end of the Cold War, we had an opportunity to try and create a more
peaceful world, to try and reduce belligerence, to reduce the number of,
or even eventually abolish the nuclear weapons in the world, and I
couldn't believe that the country and the world were launching into
another round of belligerence and warfare. That without without much
thought, without much opposition, without anybody really discussing "Why
are we doing this?" I don't mean "Why Iraq in particular?", but
realizing the magnitude of what we gave up. By doing this we gave up the
possibility for a long time of trying to find more peaceful solutions.
And this is an enormous loss, as I think people are just starting to
realize. And so, I could no longer remain quiet and so I thought, well,
where's the place to start? Well you know there are all kinds of
activists but why don't I start among my own? Among psychoanalysts and
more recently among other psychologists, and try and get them more
involved, and try and take some of the tools that we have because I
think one of the lessons of psychoanalysis is that we're all complex and
that ambivalence is central to life, that no one is all good and
probably no one or very few are all bad, that we all have anger, we all
have destructive tendencies, and we all have constructive and loving
tendencies, and the world has to accept that that's in all of us. And
creating myths of us good, them bad is a recipe for failure as we've
seen in the last ten years or so.

Pinky: Well, thank you Dr. Soldz, this has been really helpful.

Soldz: Well thank you, I appreciate it.

Pinky: Okay, take care.

Soldz: Okay, well thanks. Okay, bye bye.

Pinky: Thank you. Take care. Oh! Bye bye. [ laughs ]
That was Dr. Stephen Soldz, Director at the Center for Research,
Evaluation, and Program Development, Boston Graduate School of
Psychoanalysis in Brookline, Massachusetts.

<end transcript>

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